Background Information

Makarand Paranjape is Professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University,
New Delhi. His serveral published books include Decolonization and Development:
Hind Svaraj Revisioned (1993) and The Penguin Sri Aurobindo Reader
(2000).

Abstract

The Third Eye and Two Ways of (Un)knowing: Gnosis, Alternative Modernities,
and Postcolonial Futures

This paper takes as its starting point Sri Aurobindo's critique of Western
irrationalism. What emerges from such a critique is that the central philosophical
enterprise of the West proceeds in cycles of affirmation and negation of a certain
kind of rationality. In the last two hundred years or so, this has meant the
enthronement of instrumental reason and then its recent repudiation at the hands
of several thinkers. Neo-classcisim, romanticism, modernism, and, now, postmodernism
also show traces of a similar cycle of affirmation and negation. Seeing its
own history in terms of a progression from the pre-modern, to the modern, to
the post-modern, the West has relegated other societies to a space equivalent
to its own irrational past, thereby turning geography into history. However,
I would like to argue that a civilization such as India is neither pre-modern,
nor modern. In fact, one cannot call it post-modern or anti-modern either, though
that is how some choose to see it. I would argue that India is best understood
either as a traditional or a non-modern society. By this is meant that it does
not subscribe to the logic of History that the West has invented. In a non-modern
society, what is central is neither rationality nor its opposite, but something
else, call it wisdom, which includes but supercedes rationality. The debate
between the West and India is not between modernity and tradition or between
modernity and pre- or anti-modernity, but between modernity and non-modernity.
Indeed, in the ultimate analysis, this is a debate between two kinds of rationality,
two ways of seeing, two visions and version of the world. A new global renaissance
is possible not by rejecting or negating the West or by posting some kind of
dissenting knowledge system against the dominant one, but by trying to change
the world order on the basis of a mass inner awakening and transformation. In
this process, wisdom, which is signified by the opening of the third eye, has
to play a key role, not just the rationality-anti-rationality axis in which
we seem to be ensnared at the present.